Avoid Being Scammed

Almost everyone who owns a telephone or uses Email will have been subject to an attempted scam of one form or another — i.e., efforts by crooks to deceive us into parting with cash or valuable information that ultimately leads to our wallets and purses being plundered. Some scams may even attempted face-to-face on our doorsteps.

Email scams used be very easy to spot — often written in pigeon English by remotely located fraudsters for whom English is a second language.

But more recently, scammers have begun employing much more sophisticated and plausible techniques.

Your website editor was nearly caught out recently by an email appearing to come from a well known international courier company, with an attachment purporting to be a delivery schedule for a package due for delivery. Given the exponential growth in online purchasing and hence frequent parcel delivery by courier, this nearly tripped your editor up. Opening the attachment would have installed malware on the recipient's computer — with potentially serious consequences. For example, such malware can generate spam emails to every address on one's email contact list or, worse still, log every key stroke typed and thereby revealing passwords and other security-sensitive data such as that used for online banking or purchasing activities.

We all need to be on our guard. So it is helpful to stay abreast of some the most recent scams, in order to be more mindful of these and similar techniques that the crooks might employ in the future.

Click here to read a summary of 10 very recent scams.